The Fruitfulness of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation or The Art of Dissimulation: Cross-readings of Husserl and Levinas

Abstract

The present article proposes a new reading of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation based on a reassessment of the argumentative strategy followed by Husserl in his treatment of the question of the other and its articulation with the phenomenological egology of the Meditations. This rereading is based, first, on a distinction between two irreducible meanings of solipsism, which leads to the identification of two distinct problems: the metaphysical problem of solipsism, which Husserl resolves and discards in the Fourth Meditation, and the problem of transcendental solipsism, which the phenomenological egology of the first four Meditations cannot resolve insofar as it arises precisely from the idealist resolution of metaphysical solipsism.

The article then shows that the positioning of this problem at the opening of the Fifth Meditation responds to an internal difficulty in Husserlian egology: the unjustifiability of the first-person givenness of lived experiences. This difficulty, which affects all of Husserlian phenomenology, could only be formulated in the context of an analysis of the mode of manifestation of other egos—an analysis that reveals the possibility of questioning egology itself. Bringing this possibility to light without abandoning the principles of phenomenological egology is the aim of the "reduction to the sphere of ownness" that Husserl carries out in this Fifth Meditation, in such a way as to make possible a form of failure in the relation to the other that, paradoxically, ensures the success of its phenomenological description.